Y'know who sells lots of flex-fuel cars in Brazil? Oh yeah, that would be GM.

The down-side? Deforestation in order to plant cane. But it's currently Hobson's choice when it comes to the environmental impact of energy resource production.

Corn ethanol, by contrast, is Agribusiness's get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as an energy policy.

And Obama has, more than once (lots more), expressed solid support for corn ethanol.

The answer on biofuels is much simpler than "if you can't produce truly sustainable, renewable biofuels at home, import them from tropical nations overseas and finance the ongoing destruction of tropical rain forests."

Its, "if you can't produce truly sustainable, renewable biofuels at home, then focus on the sustainable, renewable energy that you can produce at home."

Please, when wandering outside of the health system crisis, a few less knee-jerk easy rationales and a little more fact based argument. Brazil produces less ethanol than the US does, and ethanol production in Brazil is already displacing crop and livestock production into the Amazon. More than doubling Brazilian production in service of the US market will have massive impacts on deforestation, in a vain attempt to provide a plug-and-play replacement for gasoline.

Meanwhile, an HVDC Electricity Superhighway and feed-in tariffs would support expansion of domestic Wind Power to 20% or more of US electrical generation. And electrification and capacity expansion of STRACNET would allow us to save 10% of petroleum imports, while consuming 1% of current electricity consumption.

We all know that corn ethanol is a boondoggle. But shifting the hidden costs onto rain forests is not the solution to the boondoggle.

On the easy knee jerk rationale front, the tariff on imported ethanol is the sole and solitary ecologically sound plank in current US energy policy.

The energy system that the US and other high income nations build is the energy system that middle income and low income economies will be working to adopt.

An energy economy that is built on importing biofuels "from elsewhere" therefore inevitably runs into the question, what second or third planet earth is that going to come from, when China and India and Southeast Asia and the nations of Africa adopt it?

For a country like the United States, which has roughly twice the biocapacity per person as the world average, Energy Independence is a pre-requisite for sustainability. Its certainly not sufficient, but is a requirement.

As usual, Wikipedia only half explains.

Land in southern Brazil is rapidly being converted from soybean production to sugar cane. This is exacerbated by the simultaneous conversion of soybean land to corn in the US, thereby creating something of a shortage of soybeans, but would happen nonetheless.

Soybean farmers, in turn, are acquiring previously deforested land on the edges of the Amazon. So far, so good, yes? The land is already destroyed and soybeans, being legumes, will restore the soil.

Except the ranchers who cleared the forest in the first place have been displaced by the soybean farmers and now have to move their cattle somewhere else. That place would be carved out of the rain forest.

One could ask the experts about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/opinion/lweb03cohen.html

Or the twits:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17500316/

Story is the same either way.

Agrichar, baby. It's all about agrichar. It's potentially carbon-neutral, it can use corn leaves and stalks as fuel (along with lots of other kinds of agricultural waste) and you plow the pyrolyically produced charcoal back into the soil, thereby sequestering loads of carbon. Ken Salazar already backs it and the USDA funds agrichar research.

More here.